They’re working a shift at the pizzeria, which has managed to stay open the past month, and Muneer tosses the elastic dough toward the buzzing neon lights of the kitchen.

“Do you agree?” Jameel asks. “That I shouldn’t have married her?”

Muneer adjusts his plastic gloves and sprinkles flour on the board. He lays the dough on the surface and ladles tomato sauce onto the round.

“You’re married, and God bless you,” he says.

“You’re a coward,” Jameel says. “You won’t tell me the truth.”

“It’s her opinion, not mine.”

“You think marrying your cousin is a better idea than marrying a woman you love?”

Muneer wants to say he did marry for love, but is love what he felt at the beginning? “God knows what’s best,” he says.

Jameel doesn’t talk to him the rest of the shift, or on the way to campus. When Muneer drops him off, Jameel shuts the car door too quietly, draws his hood up, and trudges away.

Muneer has half an hour until class, so he passes by the old yellow mansion that houses the ESL program. He parks the VW on the circle and walks into the wood-paneled hallway of the building. Two of Saeedah’s classmates, Sonja and Weronika, are shrugging into their coats, their backpacks bulging and unzipped on the floor. Their faces are a question: What is he doing here?

He’s not sure. Maybe he wants to test whether Saeedah would be happy to see him.

“If you’re looking for Saeedah,” Weronika says, “she didn’t come to class today. We thought maybe she had the baby.”

Outside, the temperature has suddenly plummeted ten degrees, and the wind has picked up. The top layer of snow swirls and scurries down the sidewalk. He curves his head into his neck and his arms into his torso and runs to the car.

It is barely three o’clock in the afternoon, but the sky has darkened as though night is coming. He pulls up to the house. The windows are dark, and he doesn’t bother going inside. He drives. Something takes him to her. Intuition, love, God, worry—he doesn’t know what to call it.

Today, the lake is muddy, the sky dark and dense like gray felt. The snow on the beach is ashen, and so are his thoughts.

When he sees her, he stops. He can’t move, as though he’s strapped to a chair, like a prisoner in a movie, watching her without being able to lift a finger to rescue her.

She stands at the edge of the water with waves lapping her bare feet. She slips off her jeans and white turtleneck and stands in her white bra and underwear. She walks into the choppy water, pauses, moves forward. As though overcoming the cold. The water envelops her body bit by bit, until it touches her shoulders.